Highlights 2: A Meaningful Democracy

This special series is based on an anthology of previous Boyer lectures, which were selected by ABC Chairman Donald McDonald AO. In this second program A Meaningful Democracy, you will hear the voices of Professor Martin Krygier (Between Fear and Hope, 1997), Eva Cox (A Truly Civil Society, 1995), Dr David McCaughey (Placing Together a Shared Vision, 1987), Professor Sir Keith Hancock (Today, Yesterday and Tomorrow, 1973), Professor Walter G K Duncan (In Defence of the Common Man, 1962)

Transcript

Peter Thompson: Hi, I'm Peter Thompson, and welcome to Big Ideas, and the second in the series, Highlights from the Boyer Collection, presented by Donald McDonald, Chairman of the ABC and author of the book The Boyer Collectionpublished by ABC Books in 2001. Today's program focuses on philosophy and the rights on the individual. So without further ado, here's Donald McDonald.

Donald McDonald: It is sometimes said that Australia has a lack of public intellectuals. I'm not sure what other people mean by 'public intellectuals', but if the expression refers to great minds applying themselves to an important issue of the day, and expressing their views in public, then I would argue that the Boyer Lectures have been a splendid platform for just that purpose.

In our first program, we began this process of dipping into the Boyer collection, and heard from several Boyer Lecturers on the subject of the law and human rights. Later programs will deal with population and social change, with medical research and bioethics, with art and culture, and with our history. In this program, we shall look at the nature of our society, its liberal democratic basis, its commitment to freedom, it's need for responsibility and for involvement.

Discussing some important aspects of this complex topic you'll hear from five Australian philosophers: Walter Duncan, Keith Hancock, Davis McCaughey, Eva Cox and Martin Krygier. While some people might think we have too few public intellectuals it is certainly true that we don't think of ourselves as a nation of philosophers, and yet philosophers and philosophy have been an enduring element of the Boyer Lectures.

It was 1962 when Walter Duncan, then Professor of History and Political Science at the University of Adelaide gave his Boyer Lectures under the title In Defence of the Common Man. Duncan enunciated his great theme towards the end of his first lecture when he said 'The real problem of democracy is how to make the voice of the people at once credible, well-informed and discriminating.'

Duncan's interest in the needs of democracy and the sources of its strength was not surprising, given the times in which he was writing, the early 1960s. Totalitarian governments in their variously brutal forms were to be seen in the Soviet Union and generally behind the Iron Curtain, in China, in South Africa and elsewhere. Yet 'the winds of change', in British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's evocative phrase, were blowing through Africa. Democracy had survived in France, if only just, with the establishment of the Fifth Republic in 1959. Democracy was surviving chaotically in Italy, but was not even in prospect in Spain. Democracy's wellsprings and sustenance were of vital importance to Walter Duncan in 1962, just as they are to us today.

Walter Duncan: The democratic claim to equality has nothing whatever to do with biological fact. It is a statement of moral value, and a suggest principle of social organisation. It is a claim that all people, however much they differ in talent and ability, are equally entitled as human beings, to consideration and respect. To say that men are equal in rights is not to say that they are identical in personal qualities. G.K. Chesterton put this point in a characteristically vivid way when he suggested that all men are equal in the sense that all pennies are equal. Some men are bright, some dull, just as some pennies are bright and others dull. But all have in the end, an equal value. For all pennies are stamped with the image of the King, just as all men bear the image of the King of Kings. This is the Christian claim that all men are equal as Sons of God, but the same claim can be made in secular terms, and was in fact made in such terms by the Stoics, centuries before the Christian era.

Likewise, equality in rights does not imply uniformity of treatment. To say that everyone is entitled to a good education does not mean that everyone should be given the same type of education. Some differences, such as differences in wealth, are irrelevant in a genuinely democratic educational system. But differences in the interests and capacities of the people to be educated are, or should be, the basis from which the educators start.

The very equality in rights that is claimed springs from a recognition of such differences. The reason why equal consideration should be given to people is that every single person is in some respect unique and different from his fellows. It is from respect for such differences that the democrat derives his belief in equality. Because of it, he tries to provide the individual with as much freedom to develop in his own way as is possible within an organised society. And from such mutual respect that he hopes society will come to be informed by a spirit of fraternity or fellowship.

Perfect equality or perfect anything, is not likely to be achieved in any society. The important thing is to know in which direction to move and what goals to set ourselves in public policy. Take an analogy if we were lost in the bush it might be literally a matter of life or death to know in which direction to move. If we were lucky enough to have a compass with us, or could tell from the stars where north lay, and because of this succeeded in getting out of the bush, we could then decide how much farther north we wanted to go. Few of us want to get to the North Pole, so with a social policy, aiming at equality, say. As we attain an increasing measure of it we can decide step by step how much more we want. For myself, I think we need far more of it than we have at present. I accept Matthew Arnold's advice to his generation: 'Choose equality', he said, 'and flee greed.'

The moral context for a better directed society was one of the concerns of the 1973 Boyer Lecturer, Sir Keith Hancock. Keith Hancock was a distinguished historian and social scientist. His brilliant academic career began at the University of Melbourne and took him, via a Professorship at Oxford to being Professor of History at the Australian National University.

His beautifully crafted Boyer Lectures in 1973 were titled Today, Yesterday and Tomorrow. His graceful writing displays a profound love and respect for the English language. 'A Little Lower than the Angels' was the fourth of his five lectures. At one point, Keith Hancock takes what he calls 'a long leap from the world of the Old Testament and the early Christian church, into the modern world, and the search for a key to the good society.'

Keith Hancock: My leap takes off from a famous theological controversy of the 5th century A.D. A sturdy British monk named Pelagius had the temerity to argue that man is not born under the curse of Adam's sin, on the contrary, he is born with the capacity to act not only sinfully, but virtuously, by the exercise of his own free will. He can make himself either good, or bad. He may even make himself perfect.

This sanguine view of human nature brought down on the head of the Pelagius the wrath of St Augustine. 'The fall of man', he retorted, 'is a continuing calamity. Because of Adam's sin, the whole mass of mankind is cankered at the roots. Some men are chosen for salvation by the grace of God, but no man ever has been saved or ever will be saved by his own will and effort.' This sombre, Augustinian theology prevailed. The Pelagian doctrine of freewill, was declared heretical. Pelagianism however was not so easily killed. It seeped into the Catholic church, it provoked the Protestant revolt. To this very day Augustinians and Pelagians, although they no longer know themselves, and each other, by these names, to this very day they remain locked in combat.

The theological controversy has been secularised. Among the secularisers, the Florentine Nicolo Macchiavello holds pride of place. In his political writings, necessity ousts God. Men never do any good, he asserts, except by necessity. He has inherited the Christian terminology of goodness and sin, but he uses it cheek by jowl with the Pagan terminology which he ascribes to the writers of Republican Rome. Consider the word 'goodness': there is Christian goodness which is contemptible, and Pagan goodness which is admirable. 'If you want to be good in the Christian way', he says, 'you'll have to go into a monastery. But if you want to live in the world as it is, you'll have to learn how and when not to be good in the Christian way, how and when to be predatory, mightily, deceitful, cruel.' These Christian vices are Pagan virtues. His word for them is 'virtu', by which he means courage and competence in political combat. He loved combat. He also loved shocking people. He could so easily have used mealy-mouthed words which would have offended nobody. He could have called the miser 'economical', the liar 'discreet', the cruel man 'severe' or 'firm'. Perhaps we may most fittingly remember this lively intelligent Italian as a founding father of value-free political science.

He died in AD1527. Two centuries later, a Dutch physician who had settled in London, Bernard de Mandeville, pointed the way to value-free economic science. He's remembered today by his book The Fable of the Bees or 'Private Vices, Public Virtues. Struggle, he says, 'is the law of economic activity. The great commercial nations of Europe owe their wealth and power to the pride, greed and envy of thrusting individuals.' Demand of also robust vocabulary lends itself as easily as Macchiavello's to insipid translation. In modern textbooks, his private vices are called 'incentives'. Adam Smith called them 'natural propensities'.

Adam Smith was riding the crest of a great Pelagian wave. Historians call this wave The Enlightenment, a good name because it was much in use among European philosophers of the 18th century. A conspicuous hero of the Enlightenment was the nobleman the Count d'Orsay, who grew up with mathematics and physics, blossomed as a philosopher and plunged into the politics of revolutionary France. While the Jacobins were hunting him to his death, he was writing a book to prove the perfectibility of human society. He died firm in the face that a tyrant like Robespierre is like chaff before the wind in comparison with Bacon and Descartes, Galileo and Newton, men who had discovered a method of reasoning which made it certain that progress would continue by its own momentum through all the vicissitudes of politics.

Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night.

God said, 'Let Newton be'

And all was light.

Count d'Orsay looked forward to the day when the same light would reveal not only the laws of physics, but the laws of human society. Emanuel Kant held the same faith. These enlightened men pitched their hopes too high. Nevertheless the great optimistic waves rolled on with gathering force through the 19th century and into the 20th, then it crashed on the rock of World War.

Donald McDonald: Sir Keith Hancock in 1973.

Body blows though they were, the World Wars were not the end of hope and striving for a better society. One of their champions was the 1987 Boyer Lecturer, Dr Davis McCaughey, a distinguished theologian and former Governor of Victoria. In his lectures, piecing together a shared vision, and written while he was the incumbent of Government House, Melbourne, Dr McCaughey explores our ability to share a sense of direction to give coherence to our lives. A Presbyterian clarity and firmness underlies these gentle lectures, the last of which he called Some Larger Love or Loyalty. Here is some of what he said.

Davis McCaughey: We in Australia would certainly want to draw attention to the conventions which determine moral obligations as we have inherited them in different ethnic groups. Our cultural conventions are conventional moralities deriving from different religious positions, or political convictions. Is there anything more to be said about our shared vision, matters which we could look at through common eyes in such a way as ultimately to determine public policy.

I've no doubt that there are several, but I want to select three: a common awareness of the importance of the family as the basic unit of society, a common determination that every member of the community should be provided with an opportunity to work; and a commitment to improve the quality of life for all citizens, but especially for those whose lives have been rendered poor or mean.

The many cultures to which we in Australia belong bring with them a great variety of patterns of family life from the tribal loyalties of Aborigines, to the small unit of the nuclear family, with its 2.4 children. Few institutions in our society have been subjected to closer analysis. The family has been dissected and defended from as many points of view as there are articulate social scientists or imaginative writers. We are all experts on families, for we all have been, we are, members of families, be they happy and contented or places of tension and disruption. After all the battering which the family has received from supporters and critics, two things seem to have emerged, which must belong to our shared vision. The first is that the family, nuclear and where possible extended, continues to be the primary unit in which we care for one another, not only at the beginning of life, infancy and childhood, or at the end of life, old age, declining powers, decrepitude, but also in the middle of life when apparently we are strong.

The second is that the family is the primary place of experience of moral realities, the place where we learn to talk and to speak the truth, to love and be loved. Because the family is the primary unit of care, its protection has almost always been the subject of legislation. For long, that seemed to be confined to laws relating to marriage, but when social legislation gained in prominence and the State took responsibility to support families, at least families in need, the focus shifted from concern with marriage to concern with the protection of women and children. The State today has to recognise our greater variety of patterns of family life than in the past, for instance with the growing incidence of one-parent families. But a responsibility towards the family in some shape or form is one from which no government can be allowed to walk away.

At the other end from matters on which we depend on legislation, the family is shaped by conventions which we observe. These conventions include family Christmas parties or the observance of Mothers' Day or of birthdays. For centuries, Jews have known the value of the observance of Sabbath Eve in the home. There are however other kinds of conventions which need to be observed. It's difficult to state them without sounding banal or naïve, but a fundamental convention is a respect for the truth. By this I do not mean that members of a family should always painfully be telling each other what they think, I mean rather what some Hebrew and Greek writers meant when they equated truth with reliability. Members of a family should be able to depend upon one another. This is most vividly expressed in the commitment made by a man and woman each to the other in marriage. Today there may be more de facto relationships than heretofore, and many would claim that they have as deep a commitment to each other as married couples. Nevertheless, most children are still born within a formalised marriage relationship and there is much to be learnt from that relationship. Both by common law and by the law of the church, men and women married each other in the exchange of vows. A vow is something different from an aspiration or a good intention, an exchange of vows is something more than a legal contract, though it may involve that, more than a socially convenient way of announcing to friends and relatives that a couple now intend to live together, (if they have indeed not already been doing so) more than a dramatic way of expressing a romantic attachment, it is a determination to live together for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, and so on, till death do us part. Life is no longer to be lived by inclination, but to be controlled by commitment.

We can say that and still be sympathetic when things go wrong. Few experiences are more painful than disruptions within a family. But the point is that we can and should use the phrase, 'things go wrong'. W.H. Auden wrote a poem entitled Their Lonely Betters. He describes how he '... listened in the shade ...to all the noises that my garden made,' (remainder of poem not available online for copyright reasons) It is in the family that we learn to speak. It is there that we should learn to speak the truth. It is there that we have to learn to abide by promises. It is in the family that we learn that there are other people in the world who are more important than we are and that moving out in concentric circles we should enter into relationships of confidence and trust in which constancy and loyalty are regarded as virtues.

Again, just as surely as the family is the place where we first meet the moral reality of other people with whom we must live, so the workplace in its way is also an arena where moral considerations enter into our relations one with another. The way in which we describe the moral considerations which enter in, differs in the two cases. The family operates on ethical considerations expressed in term of love and trust and forgiveness. The workplace operates with a more impersonal morality of loyalty, reliability and above all, fairness or justice.

Archbishop William Temple once described justice as 'love operating at a distance'. I cannot express my concern for my fellow human being in Africa through the exercise of personal virtues which I must practice inside my family. If I really care for him or her, if I really want to love those distant neighbours as myself, I will seek justice for them, a fair deal, access to the courts to write their wrongs, and impartial hearing of cases, a just reward for labour. Such matters may require political and legislative action. Only thus can justice be done or attempted, and love become effective at a distance.

Donald McDonald: Dr Davis McCaughey, in 1987. This is Radio National and you're listening to highlights from The Boyer Collection. I'm Donald McDonald.

The importance of our collective responsibilities also exercise social commentator, Eva Cox. Placing her faith in the civil society, her respect for debate and dissent is never far from the surface of her 1995 Boyer Lecture series titled A Truly Civil Society. Here is an extract from Eva Cox's second lecture, Raising Social Capital.

Eva Cox: Social capital refers to the processes between people which establish networks, norms, social trust and facilitate co-ordination and co-operation for mutual benefit. These processes are also known as social fabric, or glue, done deliberately using the term 'capital' because it invests the concept with the reflected status from other forms of capital. Social capital is also appropriate because it can be measured and quantified. So we can distribute its benefits and avoid its losses. We increase social capital by working together, voluntarily, in egalitarian organisations. Learning some of the rough and tumble of group processes also has the advantages of connecting us with others. We gossip, relate and create the warmth that comes from trusting. Accumulated social trust allows groups and organisations and even nations, to develop the tolerance sometimes needed to deal with conflicts and differing interests.

Therefore, we must put a high priority on growing social capital by offering opportunities for trust and co-operation. The social institutions which govern and influence us must operate in ways which value diversity and belonging. They must also be able to withstand debate and questioning.

If the social system isolates people, discourages informal and formal contact, or just fails to offer the time and space needed for social contact, then social capital is under threat. Lack of time is an increasing problem as time becomes commodified to ever longer hours of paid work. We spend time in cars in isolation and there are increasing options for individual working and leisure which intrudes upon our once informal meeting times. We rarely have time to walk, we often avoid taking public transport because it takes too long, we shop hurriedly and use technology to provide home-based entertainment and work. We need to make time for social interactions and the development of trust relationships. What once happened by accident needs to be recognised and encouraged. We need to examine how we can use technology to enhance social capital and we must look at lifestyles and life cycles, to make sure there's space and time.

Social capital should be the pre-eminent and most valued form of any capital as it provides the basis on which we can build a truly civil society. Without our social bases we cannot be fully human. Social capital is as vital as is human language for human society. We become vulnerable to social bankruptcy when our social connections fail. If most of our experiences enhance our sense of trust and mutuality, allowing us to feel valued and to value others, then social capital increases.

Donald McDonald: Eva Cox, in 1995 from her Boyer series A Truly Civil Society.

But even a cohesive civil society may not always be a comfortable place for all of us. Different experience, different memories, will foster different expectations of society. Between Fear and Hope: Hybrid Thoughts on Public Values was the densely elegant title given by Martin Krygier to his 1997 Boyer Lectures. A lawyer who was also a philosopher, and is wary of classification, a Professor of Law at the University of New South Wales, Krygier is like many Australians, both insider and outsider, what he calls A Cultural Hybrid. Australian-born but carrying historical and cultural residues of his refugee parents' backgrounds, Martin Krygier explores difference in his first lecture Hybrids and Comparisons.

Martin Krygier: There is however something else hybridicy can generate, which I think is a totally good thing: comparisons. Part of a hybrid's make-up grows out of experience, cultural traditions, a sense of other histories and possibilities, models of thought, speech, behaviour which are different from local ones. This offers to hybrids a vantage point, a perspective and a quite peculiar place to stand. That metaphorical space is simultaneously inside and outside the cultures in which they were raised, in which they live, of which they're parts, and which are parts of them. That can make hybrids critical of some things, but it can also allow them to appreciate distinctive accomplishments that non-hybrids, who haven't known their absence, might regard as natural and unremarkable. More generally, it can offer a powerful answer to parochialism which has perhaps cosy charms as a way of life but isn't much help in understanding or evaluating a way of life.

Parochialism is common enough everywhere, though its sources and character differ widely. There's a lot of it in America, for example because it's often hard for Americans to imagine that anything important happens anywhere else. In Australia, by contrast, so much that's important happens somewhere else, and everywhere else is a long way away. A common response is to over-rate the importance of that faraway stuff and then court the risk of cultural cringe, which is a wonderful Australian phrase, but a far from exclusively Australian disease. It's found in all provincial settings. Since there are many ways of being provincial, one can find it among East Europeans when they listen to Westerners, particularly rich ones, and among Americans and some Australians when they listen to Alistair Cooke. The opposite extreme is to puff up whatever is near at hand, and insist that Australians have nothing to learn from the experience of anyone else. That also is not an especially Australian condition, and everywhere it's a silly one. It allows one to be not only provincial, but a little ridiculous and narcissistic as well.

For narcissism isn't just an individual phenomenon. The morbid self-obsession characteristic of narcissistic individuals can be observed among groups, too. National narcissism thrives in many countries, both positive and negative varieties. The positive form is more familiar. The positive narcissist is confident that his country is the centre of the world. What matters happens there, and it can't be bettered.

Positive narcissism is easy to mock and it's rightly mocked. We've seen quite a bit of it in Australia in the last couple of years, and it's not a pretty sight. It contrives to combine boastfulness, ignorance, insecurity and hostility in ample and self-reinforcing measures. Not that it's melancholy twin, negative narcissism, is more attractive or less parochial. It differs from the celebratory kind, but only by inversion of value, not of subject. The subject is again one's own country and it's also superlative in a way. However what occurs here is not the best, but the worst.

America has always had plenty of positive narcissists. From the 1960s for a decade or two, it gained many negative narcissists as well. Australia had some too, though ours have often been happier to damn the Americans and us only secondarily as their satraps or cultural colonies. That's another provincial privilege.

In a century which can boast Stalin's Russia and Mao's China, Hitler's Germany and Pol Pot's Kampuchea, this position was always absurd, though it was popular enough especially among intellectuals. More generally, unless one has really thought about the many goods and evils the world has to offer, narcissism, both positive and negative, is a frivolous way to think about anything that matters.

One antidote to narcissistic tendencies is to look around. Anyone can do it. Hybrids merely have a strong temptation and good access. They have the option close at hand, indeed, under the skin. That option allows reflection upon the deceptively simple question which I consider one of the most important of all for social understanding and evaluation. That question, in all its glory and complexity, is 'Compared to what?'

I've participated in many discussions of the justice, decency, adequacy and so on of our, and other societies. Often I've been left wondering what other participants, so often firm in their frequently contradictory opinions, had in mind as standards of comparison. What counts and for what purposes? If these aren't the standards, or not the only ones, against which we should compare everyday life, what are? These aren't small questions, and these lectures will often return to them.

Of course the hybrid root to comparison isn't the only one. There are other ways to get there. The greatest observer of the United States was a Frenchman, Alexis de Toqueville, a lesser but acute observer of Tsarist Russia was another Frenchman, the Marquis de Custine. Neither was a hybrid, though it's significant that both viewed what they analysed from a cultural platform outside it.

Hybrids and foreigners are fortunate in having access to sources of comparison unearnt but built-in, but what they have by accident of birth, others can gain by choice. A strong historical sense is indispensable to any comparative consideration of human possibilities. Not all hybrids have it, nor all foreigners. And conversely, as many historians have shown, it can be obtained without moving from a well-stocked library. Also crucial is a political imagination open equally to catastrophes that must be avoided and to hopes that might be realised, whether or not they've been matters of local or immediate experience.

Donald McDonald: Martin Krygier in 1997. There we have it, a range of views about the nature of our society. In this program you've heard from philosophers Walter Duncan, Keith Hancock, Davis McCaughey, Eva Cox and Martin Krygier.

In our next program we'll look at population and social change through the Boyer Lectures, with demographer W.D. Borrie, public servant, H.C. Coombs, and educators Dexter Dunphy and Bruce Williams. And the familiar sound of the organ and 'Song of Australia' bring to an end today's highlights from The Boyer Collection.